Peripheral communications protocols provide the ability to connect additional electronic devices directly to the CPU of a Host system. Most modern peripheral communications protocols provide ultra-high speed connections to ensure the transfer of data to meet the requirements of modern CPUs. Popular peripheral protocols include the Universal Serial Bus (USB) and the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) among others. USB is a globally accepted and widely used plug-and-play interface for peripheral devices such as digital cameras, scanners, printers, Compact Disc (CD) players, Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) players, as well as modern game consoles, etc. USB connections continue to evolve, providing improvements in high speed data transfer with power delivery. Two recently released versions of the USB Specification introduced multiple advantages over previous versions and other protocols, including full duplex communications. USB version 3.0 (hereinafter “USB 3”) delivers high speed data rates of 5 Gbps (Gigabits per second) and USB version 3.1 (hereinafter “USB 3.1”) delivers 10 Gbps.
Peer to peer connections between Hosts using USB version 2.0 (hereinafter “USB 2.0” or “USB 2”) employ a fixed Host to Host cable with embedded specialized electronic components and dependent on various protocol conversions. The USB 2.0 Host to Host cable is, in reality, a virtual Ethernet cross-over cable or bridge device deployed using the USB interface solely as the medium for interconnection to the Host computers. As such, these cables require proprietary drivers and paired application software running at both ends of the connection; thus creating substantial throughput limitations as Internet Protocol (IP) packet processing and conversions are required at each Host to support the connection. As a result, despite an available 40 MBps throughput provided by the USB 2.0 port interface, actual data transfer speeds drop to only 12 MBps. Linking additional Hosts via Ethernet connections, while possible, is not viable—each additional host significantly increases overhead requirements and overall performance suffers significantly.
A direct USB 3.0 Host to Host connection has similarly been released into the market, employing the familiar method of using Ethernet cross-over cable to carry encapsulated USB 3.0 packets. Effective speed of the USB 3.0-to-Ethernet Host to Host cable using this method is reported to be approximately 40 MBps; a significant reduction from the available 480 MBps provided by the USB 3 specification. New USB 3 specifications define the use of a direct link USB 3 Male-A to Male-A Crossover cable, which does not include the Vbus or Bus Power contingent, designed primarily for connecting two Hosts for the purposes of diagnosis and other restricted uses.